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While Northeastern cold spells are a boon for the simplistic assertions that global warming is non-existant, the colder temperatures are actually in line with the greatest immediate concern of the general global warming scenario—which is that the increasing Arctic rain and Arctic ice melt will stop the North Atlantic's Thermohaline Circulation pattern.
The North Atlantic Current is driven by a saline pump that plunges super salinated water deep into the ocean off Greenland and Norway at the northernmost point of the upswelling of tropical waters. This vast cascade of heavily salted water then sucks the Atlantic's warm tropical waters north past Europe, thus keeping Europe from having the same climate as Northern Canada. The worry is that the Arctic's huge, global warming generated influx of unsalted waters from ice melt and precipitation may be getting ready to "turn off" the thermohaline circulation pump virtually overnight by geological standards—possibly in as little as a ten-year period. If the North Atlantic Current does stop (and there are very troubling indications that it may be very close to happening) average temperatures in Europe and the Eastern US could plunge almost instantly by almost 3 degrees centigrade.
Gee, that wouldn't sound anything like a more severe version of what happened this past winter, would it?
So while the general planetary trend is almost certainly toward global warming, it is still likely to be pretty cold if you're living directly beneath the wide-open door to the Arctic icebox while it hemorrhages its millions of years of cold reserves. And global warming's greatest irony may be that one of the first and most immediate results of the ever-increasing Greenhouse Effect may be the shivering masses of the Eastern US suffering what I would call the Refrigerator Door Effect--it may be a sweltering summer day, but it still feels cool if you're parked right next to the open refrigerator door where all the ice in the freezer is melting.
For more information on the North Atlantic Termohaline circulation patterns, see Wally Broecker's work at Columbia's Lamont Doherty Laboratories and The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, the remarkable work of the world's leading ice scientist, Richard Alley.
But the best warning of what we could be doing to ourselves comes from Wally Broecker: "The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks."
Steve Corrick
Editor, Gardenearth.com
gardenearth@aol.com
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